This year’s early-summer weather in Iqaluit has had its ups and severe downs. It has been cold, grey, and quite uninspiring for home decorating. On the downside, it has brought lots of fog and ice into town that has drawn a number of polar bears near our house lately – meaning that we can’t wander far from home (at least not without ammunition or bear spray). On the upside of it though, it has meant that bug season has been delayed enough for me to spend more time in the front yard doing some landscaping.

I was initially thinking to do just one or two small things to add some curb appeal to our place over the summer. Nevertheless, once one project was started I began finding other little things I could do to improve our curb-side look and my ‘to-do’ list quickly snowballed.

This month I’m starting a new section of ARCTICdeco called My Favorite Things. I figure if I can’t have everything I covet, I may as well write about them and hope that one day they’ll be mine. You’re going to love this month’s line up too!

One of the ways I like to keep fresh veggies in the house throughout the year is by regrowing vegetables from their scraps. Some vegetables can be easily regrown without much of any effort and it can be a great way to get a head start on your summer garden.

We’re a week into June and our Arctic garden is finally starting to come to life. There may still be plenty of ice and snow in the bay, but in our greenhouse there’s nothing but sprouts, sprouts, sprouts! After a month of very slow starting seeds, our greenhouse is bursting with all sorts of seedlings. I started some of these seeds way back in April – primarily the coriander, basil, and sunflowers – but had to wait until the end of May to get most of the others started (when the greenhouse stopped going below zero). So far I’ve started the season with my favorites:

It’s spring in Nunavut! For most of you ‘southerners’ south of 60, it has already been spring for many weeks now (if not months) but up in the ‘Vut it’s only really started to feel like spring in the last few weeks – ‘spring’ being T-shirt weather. Mind you – in late April when the sun started coming back and we were getting -15ºC temperatures, I may have celebrated the good weather by hanging out on my deck in a tank top. Nevertheless.

Now that it’s February, and I’ve finally put away the Christmas decorations, and the last buds of my paperwhites have fallen, it’s time to prepare the bulbs for next winter.

Since this is my first year planting bulbs, I’m still learning some of the tricks of the trade. As you’ll recall from my post earlier this winter on growing bulbs indoors, I’ve got a large selection of amaryllis and paperwhite bulbs that are ready for their dormancy preparations.

When I was younger, my friend Allie’s mom always had the loveliest flowers blooming in their house in the middle of winter. When Allie moved back north last winter, she started up the tradition again and had a little spring oasis in her house. So it got me thinking…

So we’re a few days away from officially owning this place and I’m eager to start some projects right away, before our sealift arrives. Unfortunately for us, we still have another 3 weeks before all of our furniture, paint, and supplies arrive on the boat, so I’ve decided to start tackling the greenhouse, since its the only room I hadn’t given much thought to, until now.